This
is the latest issue of “Holistic Vision”, the spiritual
project by the author and consciousness researcher Floco Tausin.
It is devoted to a phenomenon known as idiopathic or harmless
“eye floaters” or “muscae volitantes”
(see
pictures) among ophthalmologists. We see them
as scattered, mobile, transparent dots and strings in our visual
field. “Holistic Vision” includes ophthalmology but
questions its conclusion on floaters and goes beyond. For the
observation and open eye meditation reveals a connection between
altered states of consciousness and the way floaters look. Furthermore,
a look at different cultures highlights floaters as an object
of art and spirituality. By this “holistic vision”,
Floco Tausin pursues the question whether these spheres and strings
are first appearances of a shining structure of consciousness
within which we cover a distance to our spiritual origin –
a path that lights up through open eye meditation.

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Nestor's
Knowledge on Eye Floaters

The static and the dynamic
effect of the basic structure

Eye floaters
and their meaning were interpreted differently depending on the time,
culture and personality of the observer. We learn a spiritually meaningful
perspective about floaters from Nestor, the seer, with whom I have studied
and whose teachings I recorded in the book „Mouches volantes
– Eye Floaters as Shining Structure of Consciousness“.
In this category, a particular statement from the book on floaters shall
be presented and explained.

»You
already know the static effect of seeing … This
one has to do with the spheres and strands, that is, the basic
structure. The dynamic effect, on the other hand, only shows
up in extreme situations – moments in which there is a
high level of intensity within you, when the amount of energy
is extraordinarily large in comparison to what you are able
to stand up to. Then we start to perceive tiny luminous spheres
moving fast in all directions. Basically this dynamic effect
is nothing else than energy forming the tracks of the basic
structure.«

Nestor
speaks of the two visual effects that a seer sees and distinguishes
in the shining structure: the “static effect”,
i.e. the shining structure itself, and the “dynamic effect”,
i.e. the energy that flows in that structure. Therefore, the seers suggest
that observing one’s own basic structure does not only reveal
its shining, but the shining is recognized as a flowing – in the
form of glowing little spheres that move in curved tracks.

With this,
the seers combine two subjective visual phenomena that have nothing
to do with each other in physiology: on the one hand, the non-pathological
eye floaters which are regarded as vitreous opacity; on the other hand,
an entoptic phenomenon that is known as “starlets”, “flying
corpuscles” or “blue field entoptic phenomenon”. In
physiological terms, the latter is explained as leukocytes which flow
in the retinal capillaries and become visible particularly when gazing
at a bright blue surface. In intense physical conditions often implying
poor blood circulation – conditions such as shock, dizziness and
fainting – these starlets become very luminous and can be seen
very clearly for some time.

Nestor and
the seers experience and understand these starlets as a visual accompaniment
of intense states of consciousness and an indication of their increased
presence in the picture. In the seers’ cosmological beliefs which
are based on their seeing, the starlets have a creative function: they
create the tubes of the shining structure by their very motion. In my
own seeing, I can only partially comprehend that. Because the bright
starlets or little spheres usually move freely, not in visible tracks.
However, there are exceptional circumstances where I see a kind of a
channel through which several little spheres flow in a row – which
rather corresponds to the notion of flowing energy which creates the
basic structure. However, these starlets have little practical significance
for the seers who prefer the shining structure floaters for their visual
consciousness work. That’s because the dynamic starlets are hardly
suitable for the concentrative seeing, or the “holding of the
picture in suspension”, respectively.

„I
am glad to have found your perspective on this issue of vision
fields and floaters. It is one near to me, and an issue of interest
since the birth of my son in 2009. My son had his unique way of
entering this physical earth world. At the very very end of our
pregnancy my body developed pre-eclampsia. One thing midwife kept
asking me if I was seeing any ‘floaters’ or dots in
vision. I was not seeing that in particular, but my entire vision
field was enhanced. I do regularly get floating strings thru my
field of vision, have my whole life. The experience of the birth
of my son affected my vision field for days, in fact one eye was
seeing everything cast in orange light. I could see into other
dimensions (like cartoon characters dancing on ceiling tiles,
playing out elaborate stories). I know for sure in order to bring
my son into this world I had to go right to the edge of this world,
and the visual impact stunning. Have you done much research or
talked to many woman about the eye floaters with this condition?“
-- Julie

Thanks, Julie, for your
interesting report. My knowledge on pregnancy is very limited
and, of course, second-hand. Also, while I talked to pregnant women
about their state of being and feeling, I’ve never heard about
floaters being more intense. However, these women left no doubt that
pregnancy is an extraordinary psychophysical state. Or in other words:
a state of intensified energy and consciousness. This is culminated
in the moments of giving birth to a child. There are, of course, medical,
biological, neurochemical ways of expressing what’s going on in
a woman’s body that is pregnant or giving birth. I do not know
much about that, but the nervous system certainly releases a whole cocktail
of neurotransmitters like dopamine and oxytocin. In fact, I heard that
pregnancy and/or giving birth may feel like certain kinds of hallucinogens.

Sure, different
women have very different experiences. In your case, you did experience
an altered state with your vision enhanced. In states like these, it
is no surprise to me that a woman experiences so-called ‘entoptic
phenomena’ or floaters. I did a little research and found that
confirmed insofar as floaters are often mentioned as visual changes
due to pregnancy. However, we have to carefully differentiate: ‘Floaters’
is a term that is used very widely. It may refer to what I call ‘shining
structure floaters’ which is, to me, a sign of intensified consciousness
and energy. But it may also refer to pathological conditions of the
eye, e.g. retinopathy which looks very different from shining structure
floaters – have a look at my illustrated diagram
. So I think that when your midwife asked about ‘floaters’
in your vision, she was checking on pathological developments of your
retina that may be caused by (pre-)eclampsia. There are also other pathological
conditions that are associated with pregnancy and known to cause floaters,
like gestational diabetes. On the other hand, what you actually describe
as seeing different colors and ‘cartoon characters on tiles’
is, to me, a sign of an intensified state of consciousness – as
it reminds me on my own visual perceptions during such states.

As
I learn from your lines, not only is your body and mind sensitive
to extraordinary states of consciousness, you are also open
to alternative and spiritual considerations of states like these.
Therefore, I suggest to include your extraordinary states associated
with the life-giving power (pregnancy, menses) of your body into a holistic
worldview – whatever that may be in your case – in order
to recognize these states as chances to cleanse your psychophysical
system (which may be accompanied by discomfort) and renew your connection
to the cosmic whole. Let your light illuminate the world!-- Floco

“Arts”
introduces realistic, artistic, and/or spiritual/religious works from
different cultures and times which show – or may be inspired
by – floaters or other entoptic phenomena.

Thanks to the digitization
of visual media and their spread via the internet, we now have easy
access to numerous pictures and even some videos that represent
floaters from the subjective perspective. One of these videos
is "Eye-Floaters:
painless torture". It shows in less than
a minute how floaters look like from the perspective of a floater
sufferer who is walking in a park. We see small dots and strings
on a distant layer, and large streaks on a very close layer. The
strings are slightly blurred, mostly semi-transparent to black and
partly contain single spheres. Two such spheres light up when seen
before a dark background, the others remain dark. The streaks are
very blurry and also semi-transparent. Both the dots and strings,
as well as the streaks move according to the eye or head movements
of the walker. While the streaks dynamically change their constellations,
the more distant points and strings are fairly static and do not
change their constellations.

Painless
torture? Eye floaters.

The
video was made by Andrej Piatkowski, a freelance artist
specializing in three-dimensional medical animations, illustrations
and interactive works. Piatkowski said on inquiry that this video
was not a job, but was made on his own initiative and based on his
observations of eye floaters. The aim was to give floater sufferers
something to better explain and illustrate their condition to eye
doctors. Piatkowskis spheres and strings could actually be the shining
structure floater type. However, in the seers’ seeing and my
own, floaters are far more dynamic, outlined and bright. According
to my experience, this ‘light side’ of the floaters goes
hand in hand with a meditative seeing and a deeper and holistic understanding.
Piatkowski, on the other hand, rather depicts the ‘dark side’
of floaters that is – from the seers’ energetic-ecstatic
perspective – a result of a low energy flow. To get the suffering
of the floater sufferers across, Piatkowski entitles the spheres and
strings as ‘painless torture’ and includes morbid sounds.
This perfectly expresses the often depressed mood of floater sufferers.

It is the
people who decide whether and to what extent this representation of
floaters applies to them. If this video confirms the floater sufferers
in their self-pity and sorrow and encourages ophthalmologists to more
readily perform vitrectomies, it increases the psychological and medical
darkening of shining structure floaters. However, if it helps to open
up different perspectives on floaters and encourages the viewer to
more accurately observe her or his own spheres and strings –
and possibly to develop his or her own ways of dealing with them –,
then it contributes to the lighting up of these structures and intensification
of consciousness.

You will find
simillar entoptic pictures in the gallery.
Do you have drawings of eye floaters or other entoptic phenomena (flying
corpuscles, afterimages etc.)? Do you know of realistic, artistic
and religious representations of such appearances? Then send
me the picture or give me the tip; I would like to publish
it in the newsletter and/or in the gallery.

What’s
new in the scientific research on floaters and other entoptic phenomena?
How do these scientific approaches relate to the holistic view of floaters
presented in this project? Find out here.

Official
Abstract of the Study

“Patients experiencing
flashes and spots in their perceptive fields often resort to consulting
an ophthalmologist without finding an answer, mainly because these
symptoms are not necessarily associated with pathology of the
eye. The purpose of our research study was to understand
the experience of these patients, differentiate among
them, and propose different ways of treating them. We carried
out an eye examination and echography, individual semi structured
interviews, and dependency grids with 11 patients at the ophthalmology
department of a public hospital in northern Italy. We found that
individuals’ ways of experiencing and reacting to eye floaters
might be different and might depend on the perception of the disease,
the personal explanation, the solutions tried, the trust placed
in medicine, self-construction, and the dispersion of dependency.
Understanding the experiences of patients suffering from eye floaters
might help health care professionals to personalize their approaches
to these patients.”

Summary
of the Results

As the authors
show in this study, the eye floaters (EF) experience is shaped
rather by the patients’ personalities than by the condition
of their vitreous bodies. There are those who don’t
suffer from EF because they just don’t care or they are
self-confident enough to meaningfully integrate their EF in their
lives and worldviews – irrespective of whether or not they
present posterior vitreous detachment or high vitreous opacity
at the medical checkup. And then there are those who suffer from
EF, e.g. because they fear serious health issues, or because they
are forced to change their way of life. Floater sufferers experience
EF as a limitation of their usual lives and activities; therefore,
they are looking more or less actively for medical or alternative
solutions. Again, some floater sufferers do have vitreous detachment
and vitreous opacity while others don’t. These different
types of floater patients challenge eye doctors in different ways:
While patients who don’t experience floaters as a problem
usually are fine with the doctors’ explanations, floater
sufferers with high vitreous opacity can be supported by confirming
the subjective experience from a medical point of view, and can
be helped by offering surgery (vitrectomy). Floater sufferers
without corresponding clinical signs in the vitreous body, however,
are a “puzzling” problem to ophthalmologists who usually
solve that problem by referring these patients to other doctors
or to psychologists, therefore increasing public health-care costs.
The authors suggest different treatment strategies according to
the personalities of floaters patients: encourage the floater
non-sufferers with no corresponding vitreous opacity to pursue
their own integration of EF; educate the floater ignoring non-sufferers
with vitreous opacity about the risks; placebo, alternative therapies
and psychotherapy for the “puzzling” floater sufferers;
and medical support to the point of surgery to the manageable
floater sufferers.

Individual
semistructured interviews with 11 patients at the ophthalmology
department of a public hospital in northern Italy. (Source)

Floco’s
comment

Psychological approaches are rare
among scientific studies on EF. That’s a pity, because they
could counterbalance the dominant medical approach by stressing
the importance of the subjective experience. In that context,
the constructivist approach that the authors take seems to be
progressive: Clearly, human beings construct the meaning of EF
in line with their worldview and personalities, and this has been
neglected for too long in ophthalmology. On the other hand, the
study is perfectly in line with today’s ophthalmology. I
missed, for example, a critical discussion of the constructive
nature of the concept of EF. Because, the patients are not the
only ones who construct the meaning of EF; as medicine history
shows, physiologists and ophthalmologists also do.

‘EF’
(or mouches volantes, muscae volitantes) is, in fact, a very poorly
defined term, encompassing different types of pathological and
non-pathological ‘opacities’ in the vitreous body.
Referring to that concept, the study also lumps together different
kinds of EF. Though the authors indicate that there are the ‘degenerative’
EF and the ‘retinal tears’ EF, they don’t clearly
separate those kinds throughout the text. Also, they keep writing
about EF as a ‘disorder’ and even ‘disease’
and ‘illness’, even if most EF are not considered
as such neither by ophthalmologists, nor by the patients. Here
the study perpetuates the pathologizing of all types of EF, the
so-called age-related, degenerative EF which are said to be harmless,
as well as the EF which can be traced back to pathological conditions
like retinal detachment, choroidal melanoma, uveitis etc. These
are completely different phenomena corresponding to different
subjective perceptions, and they should be called by different
terms – in order to develop more appropriate treatments
and coping strategies.

To put it in other words: While
I think that the authors do a great and important job to stress
the diversity of the subjective experiences of EF by focusing
on the psychological processes behind that experience, they don’t
seem to pay too much attention to the possibility that these perceptual
differences may indeed be caused – or at least informed
– by different types of EF. Non-pathological EF which I
call ‘shining structure floaters’ might not even be
a vitreous opacity phenomenon. This is suggested not only by the
lack of clear correlation between objective examination and the
subjective experiences, but also by the construction of the term
EF in Western medical history which located EF in different parts
of the eye, as well as by most recent developments in the context
of Nd:YAG laser surgery for eye floaters that indicate that one
non-pathological type of EF just can’t be seen in the vitreous
body and might be located somewhere else (e.g. in the premacular
bursa).

To broaden the
scope: The Western ‘degenerative’ and ‘retinal
tears’ explanation may be the dominant one, but they are
not the only one. Also, there are different approaches
to EF in alternative eye health systems, like the one of William
H. Bates, as well as in Eastern medical traditions like TCM and
Ayurveda. And there are even indications that EF, along with other
subjective visual phenomena, have been seen, interpreted and conveyed
in the context of shamanic rituals since the paleolithic; EF as
a spiritually or religiously relevant phenomenon may also play
a role in today's world views, from the shamanic Amazonian natives,
to the Tibetan Dzogchen Buddhists, to modern Western alternative
religions like the one of the Emmental seers.

“Today
I was amazed to see almost full circles, not just one but
three, Ive never seen anything like this shape before. I then
remember you & wondered about doing some research just
out of sheer curiosity. … Thought I’d check my
email to see if I could remember the name of the floater site,
wow who did I discover an email from – exactly the site
I was looking for.”-- Paules

“I’m
so happy i found you on the internet!!”-- Biz

Thanks,
Paules and Astrid for your positive feedback. I hope your
curiosity and happiness inspire all of us to brighten our
day and illuminate our pictures--
Floco